Iran Regime's False Bravado Over the Warsaw Summit

Written by Staff Writer on 23 January 2019.

By Staff Writer

Iranian officials are putting on a false show of bravado before the planned international summit on Middle East peace, which is expected to focus on the malign interference of the Iran Regime and feature a renewed pitch for an “Arab NATO” by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

The head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Ali Shamkhani, attempted to present the White House’s global appeal as evidence that sanctions and diplomatic isolation were failing, just days after the Warsaw summit was announced.

Shamkhani said: “When someone who says ‘sanctions with maximum pressure’ is reduced to holding ‘seminars and conferences’, it only means that he has lost the upper hand.”

He then claimed that the US plans for the event only demonstrate pure “confusion”, while Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tweeted that the summit is a “desperate circus”.

While we will have to wait and see whether the February 13-14 summit will be everything that the US wants it to be, Iran’s early dismissal of it shows that the mullahs want to be seen as strong and confident that the summit will end in their favour, even if there is no reason to think that.

This shows that the Iranian Regime, as opposed to its enemies, are “desperate” and “confused”. They have no idea how to deal with increased international scrutiny and internal unrest, so they are hitting out at anything that could make matters worse. This means that the US “maximum pressure” campaign, which is a mixture of economic sanctions and political pressure, is working.

Maryam Rajavi, the President-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), a coalition of democratic groups advocating for regime change in Iran, praised the US recently for “rectifying and ending the disastrous policy of appeasement” that has lasted for forty years.

And the US is not the only government taking action on Iran. EU support for the Iranian nuclear deal of 2015, in particular helping Iran to evade US sanctions that were reimposed after Donald Trump pulled out of the pact last May has wavered in recent weeks, with more EU states expressing concern over everything from Iran’s missile tests to terrorist actions. This was spurred by the many terrorist attacks or assassination attempts that the Regime carried out in Europe last year alone, that has led to EU-wide sanctions on the Iranian intelligence service and a move towards US policy on Iran.

Theoretically, of course, EU member states could still skip the Warsaw conference, but that is unlikely because it would be disastrous for EU-US negotiations, not to mention the fact that it is being held in an EU member state.

Ryszard Czarnecki, a member of the European Parliament and a former European minister of Poland, wrote: “Doing so would represent a reversal of the current trend toward greater scrutiny of Iran and greater awareness of the terrorist threats that continue to emanate from the regime… Most of the current evidence points to that shift being embraced as a model for Western democracies and Iran’s global adversaries.”